cleaning a planted tank

[pygmy]

When you have a traditional tank with gravel bottom you use a siphon to clean the bottom.How do you clean a planted aquarium??

 

[Raimeiken]

don't unroot any plants, just hold the siphon tube a little over the gravel until you see the dirt getting sucked up. Don't worry if you don't get alll of it, that stuff is beneficialk to the plants also.

 

[medge00]

i hardly ever vacuum. there's not much room between plants. i do it every other month maybe?

 

[millipede]

yeah, I agree, try not to uproot any plants if you don't have to... however if it is a heavily planted tank it might be hard to siphon around them... just do your best is about all I can say... I know that the python siphons and such have a fairly large tube to suck everything up with... I recently bought one of those gravel cleaners that is run by a regular air pump... It works a lot better than one might imagine.. It still requires patience, you just sitting there, waiting while all the crap gets sucked up... the difference is you can clean and clean without having to constantly refil, and the part that cleans the gravel is smaller than most of the syphons that I"ve seen... That's why I brought it up, it might be able to get around the plants a little easier... just rinse the filter bag out when it gets really dirty... The only real downside I see to one of these is that it may get people to forget about water changes... other than that I love it... And yeah, a some of that "crap" at the bottom is good for the plants... but it does need to be cleaned once in a while... Good luck with it...

 

[Allivymar]

In my case I gravel vac the sand once a week. Yes, I know the plants can use the mulm as fertilizer but oi, I had no idea how much otos POOP. Omg, within one day of cleaning the sand its covered in oto poop again. Blech.

I use a small siphon with a narrow opening.

 

[vega]

I brought a SERA gravel cleaner.

That's the only gravel filter that i find suitable for cleaning planted tank.
Its tube is about 1/3 inch wide n ~2 feet long.
It need to attach to a aquarium pump to works.
Checkout at :-

http://www.sera.de/English/autoframe.htm?url=http://www.sera.de/English/Produkte/Staubsauger.htm

HTH

 

[PrettyFishies]

Let's say you have a 29 Gal and you have a Pleco and 2 Cory Cats maybe some ghost shrimp as well. Do you think they would do a sufficient job so that you would just need to really suck out the water for nitrate purposes?

 

[vega]

In my 30gal i have 3 flying fox, 2 CAE, 4 panda cory n 8 ghost shrimp.
No overfeed.

I still do gravel siphon once to twice a month. imo solid poop in gravel and dead leaf still need to siphon out manually time to time in a planted tank.

hth

 

[LAGlocker]

I gravel vac like every two weeks, cause I dont know of any cleaner fish that will actually eat the solid waste a fish produces. Not sure if a snail will, since i cant keep snails between the loaches and the puffers. but wouldnt think they would mess with it either.

 

[Mr Burns]

even if the fish eat solid waste (which they don't,) they're eventually going to make waste that is going to start breaking down in the gravel. i have seen my RTS eat the poop from my pleco, but i think that was because it was mostly made up of zuccini material that didn't get completely digested so there was still some nutritional value to it. if you have plants covering everything, they'll use it as fertilizer so there is no problem there. but if there is an area of uncovered gravel, that should be vac'd to remove the majority of solid waste. ditto to what vega said.

 

[PrettyFishies]

So in a heavily planted tank, it's not so much a big deal?

 

[vega]

try to kept the tank as clean as possible....

if you accumulate the solid waste in the tank, the tank eco will break down eventually.